We in IT are faced with many challenges from our end users. From IT costs to application performance, while always keeping an eye on our network security posture. This reminds me of a sign on the wall of my auto mechanic’s shop: Good, Fast, Low-cost. I was always told I am allowed to pick only two. I would of course question him, “why cant I have something with high quality, on time, and within budget?” This always made him smile, but he still told me I could only pick two.

So back to our IT challenges: Cost, Performance, and Security. Application performance is something we can all see, feel and touch. When thinking about performance, we need to also consider where these applications are coming from. Looking at applications like Microsoft’s Office 365, we are seeing mission critical applications from outside our data centers being delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. Does this matter to our end users? They sit at their PC’s, Tablets, Mac’s, etc. and know when something is not going fast enough. Their expectations are growing; they always expect the best performance. If they don’t feel their Outlook e-mail is opening fast enough or that the saving of their PowerPoint file is taking too long, they do not hesitate to let us know. And oddly enough, everyone just assumes it is the network. So not only do we need to think about our networks, but the Internet performance as well.

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), founded in 1957, is located in the heart of showbiz industry in Las Vegas. The school offers higher education programs ranging from business, engineering, fine arts and music, and science, and professional schools such as dental medicine and law.

The school’s mascot, Hey Reb, was recently featured on Hulu’s “Behind the Mask,” and you may recognize the Southern Gym during the dance scene between Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret Olsson in the movie Viva Las Vegas.

With over 24,000 unique WLAN users per day, 1.1 gigabytes of throughput per second, and more than 50 wireless access locations across campus providing WLAN coverage, this educational institute demands a massive Wi-Fi network.

In the previous blog, we highlighted some of the Bonjour enhancements of the 7.5 software release and the deployment of Bonjour at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School, a K-12 school. In this blog, we will describe details about UNLVs WLAN deployment, how they use Bonjour services, and give you an insight into rapid pace of innovation necessary to support this technology in the education arena. Read More »

As Wi-Fi continues to be the primary mode of access, enterprise Unified Communication(UC) applications usage is increasing with smartphones, tablets and laptops.

Customers are asking, is there anything I can do to prioritize Jabber or Lync traffic over others or even identify how much of the traffic is really collaboration traffic vs. other types of media. The recently introduced Wireless Release 7.6 enhances the ability to classify Microsoft Lync 2013 and Jabber with Cisco WLAN Infrastructure.

In the first blog about Application Visibility and Control over Cisco WLAN, I captured what is AVC and the capabilities included in the release 7.4. In a subsequent blog, I had captured a success story about a customer who benefited from the reliability by deprioritizing scavenger level applications as well as captured highlights of the enhancements in release 7.5. This blog captures how the release 7.6 allows popular collaboration applications to be accurately classified and prioritized as well as provides a teaser to some of the innovations that can be expected in the future.

What exact capabilities AireOS 7.6 provide ?

The protocol pack 6.3 introduced in AireOS 7.6 allows you to identify and prioritize not just Jabber but also sub-classify Cisco Jabber Audio, Cisco Jabber IM and Cisco Jabber Video. Customers may want to prioritize the Cisco Jabber Audio as the highest priority while the others may be lower priority. Similarly you can classify not just Microsoft Lync but also Microsoft Lync Audio, rtcp and Microsoft Lync Video and thereby prioritize them separately. Read More »

With the announcements on NX-OS APIs, Application Centric infrastructure APIs, python scripting support, SDN, open source projects OpenStack, OpenDaylight, and Puppet, I have opened an account at codecademy.com and will start with Python and Java. I see many late nights in my future. This stubborn old networker is finally onboard.

I have worked in IT since 1995 and never learned programming. Sure, I can do a little HTML, and years ago, I learned just enough Perl to configure MRTG, but I have never written a program. The good old CLI has kept me very busy and brought home the bacon.

Therefore, I have opened an account at codecademy.com. I will start with Python and Java. I see many late nights in my future.

I have thought about learning code, but I could never think of an app I wanted to write. Now Cisco is bringing together networking and programming. Cisco is not only making APIs available, Cisco is contributing code to the open source community. In fact, Cisco has created a Data Center repository, a Nexus 9000 community, and a general Cisco Systems repository on GitHub.

Cisco has recently overhauled the developer program and its content. The new DevNet website is filled with developer information on products such as AVC, Collaboration, UCS, CTI, Energywise, FlexPod, UCS Microsoft Manager, Jabber, onePK, XNC, Telepresence.

Cisco is bringing the networking and programing worlds together and this stubborn old networker is finally onboard.

Happy Coding!

Bill Carter is a Senior Network Engineer with more than 18 years of experience. He works for Sentinel Technologies and specializes in next-generation data center, campus and WAN network services.

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